The book on practice that Gabriel Levine and I edited has now been published by MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery of Art. We think it looks good — a photograph of Francis Alÿs from his famous “Paradox of Praxis” series is on the cover.

We’ll be launching the book at the Whitechapel Gallery of Art in London on April 26, in a conversation with visual artist Kader Attia (whose amazing work on repair is featured at the end of the book) and philosopher Nina Power. There will also be a Berlin launch on April 28 at Hopscotch Books, and a Toronto launch on May 31 at the University of Toronto Art Center.

MIT has a good description of the book. You can view the table of contents here. Our goal was to open up new ways of thinking about practice and its relationship to art, and even to ask the question whether we were moving into a world where practice is becoming autonomous from art. We received some sublime responses to the book:

“Boon and Levine have assembled an engaging collection of short essays, manifestos, interviews, impressions and expressions, which together explore the rich density of “practice”. It is about art, and will fascinate anyone who experiences politics, philosophy and everyday life as forms of artistry — as artistic “practices” that repeat, hustle, experiment with, fly free from, and play with established subjectivities, cruelties, virtues. A bracing and marvellous book.” Jane Bennett, Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

“To move from competency to fluency to freedom takes some practice, but just what that entails — as this volume makes clear — is more than technique. Personal desires comingle with social questions, to that whether working solo or in coalitions of the like-minded, having a practice is always a dynamic process of situating oneself in the world. And as writers from across a wide spectrum offer here, when embodied consciousness and impassioned commitment take hold, practice as a way of working becomes a way of being. Mary Jane Jacob, Director, Institute of Curatorial Research and Practice, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

“Political, philosophical, poetic, aesthetic and critical, Practice will be of great use to anyone working with and thinking about this most dominant (but obscure) of terms. The texts collected here are fresh and provocative. From magic to high art theory, structuralism to anarchism, Boon and Levine have collected the most vital words on the “practical turn” in art, and many other ways of thinking about practice besides.” Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Roehampton

Gabriel Levine and I are in the process of editing a new volume in the excellent MIT/Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art book series on the topic of Practice. The book should be out in early 2018. The book collects writings about practice by philosophers, artists and other kinds of practitioners. There will likely be about 80 selections in the book, including texts by Karl Marx, Paul B. Preciado, the Dalai Lama, Lygia Clark, Group Material and many more.

To quote from an introduction written by Gabe and I: “In the early twenty-first century, no single word crops up in so many contexts – from art to science to theory to politics to everyday life – as “practice.” A central term in the social sciences, from science studies to sociology to media studies, “practice” is often taken for granted and only occasionally explicitly theorized. Artists and non-artists write statements describing “my practice,” while art critics speak of “social practice” or “contemporary practice.” In politics, practice a.k.a. “praxis” is in crisis – caught between old forms of mass struggle and new social movements anchored in the collective practice of daily life. And all of this is occurring on a global scale. Yet in all of these contexts, the layers and histories of “practice” are rarely addressed. What do people talk about when they talk about practice? Is everything a practice – and what are we (diverse humans and nonhumans around the planet) practicing for?

Once used philosophically to designate “doing,” (praxis) in a triad with “thinking” (theoria) and “making,” (poiesis) practice has soaked up other connotations: from political action (revolutionary praxis), to professional activity (the practice of law or medicine), to discipline, rehearsal or training (zen practice, basketball practice). The discourse of practice in contemporary art tends to blend all of these meanings, with “practice” also standing in for the shift away from the artwork or medium, and toward open-ended actions, series, processes and projects. While the turn to “practice” might promise a freedom from finality or eventfulness, it also reflects the neoliberal pressures to train oneself, to perform, and to rehearse a marketable set of skills. On this “planet of the practicing,” as the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls it, there are winners and losers, and perhaps those who fail should just have practiced a little harder. Indeed, practice and “praxeology” were central to the work of Austrian school economist Ludwig von Mises, who clearly saw the discipline of economics as a whole as the study of modes of organizing “purposeful action” (Human Action).”

My own work has been focused on the problem of practice for many years. In the 2000s I explored the idea of “sadhana”, the Sanskrit word for practice, and the relation of Asian religions to contemporary literature. I tried to show the varied attempts to reformulate an idea of practice by writers from Europe and America encountering Buddhism and yoga, and how their worldviews were destabilized by a new thought of practice. This work formed the basis of my contribution to Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (U. Chicago, 2015) as well as various essays on Buddhist topics. It also informed my attempt to develop a Buddhist theory of intellectual property in In Praise of Copying (Harvard, 2010), and my contribution to the shift in studies of IP from legal debates to the study of “practices of copying”. My more recent work on “sound and popular discipline” uses the latter term as a synonym for practice – or praxis, in the sense of collective action. In The Politics of Vibration and other essays and talks, I argue for a rethinking of sound studies that take into account popular practices of sonic production and consumption. The Book of Methods, the co-edited collection of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s unpublished writings on the cut up and other radical aesthetic practices, that I’m working on with Davis Schneiderman is also a kind of experimental manual of practices. I might even claim that my work on drugs and literature, notably in The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, addressed the problem of what it might mean to speak of a literary practice, notably insofar as literary drug use has involved formal protocols of experimentation, as in the work of Benjamin, Burroughs and more recently, Preciado.

I wrote a primer on Moroccan “trance” music for the March 2017 issue of The Wire. The piece is built around the recently issued Dust to Digital set of Paul Bowles’ 1960 recordings made in Morocco, and covers (briefly!) the history of 78 recordings in Morocco, other ethnographic recordings such as those made by Ocora and by Philip Schuyler for Lyrichord in the 1970s and 1980s, the folk revival led by groups like Nass El Ghiwane, Jil Jilala and Lemchaheb in the 1970s, the history of recordings made at Jajouka and of the Gnawa brotherhoods, the long history of collaborations between jazz musicians and Moroccan traditional musicians, from Randy Weston through Peter Brotzmann and Ornette Coleman, the amazing career of Hassan Hakmoun and the more recent metal/noise sounds of Abu Lahab. I meditate on “trance” as a word and phenomenon that spans both traditional and avant garde musics, secular and sacred sounds, and one that changes historically and geographically in meaning. Bowles himself preferred the word “hypnotic” because it sounded more secular. “Psychedelic” might work too.

The essay begins with this amazing quote from Bowles, from his essay “The Rif, To Music”:

“Few of them are as frank about their convictions as the official in Fez who told me: “I detest all folk music, and particularly ours here in Morocco. It sounds like the noises made by savages. Why should I help you to export a thing which we are trying to destroy? You are looking for tribal music. There are no more tribes. We have dissolved them. So the word means nothing. And there never was any tribal music anyway – only noise. Non, monsieur, I am not in accord with your project.” In reality, the present government’s policy is far less extreme than this man’s opinion. The music itself has not been much tampered with – only the lyrics, which are now indoctrinated with patriotic sentiments. Practically all large official celebrations are attended by groups of folk musicians from all over the country; their travel and living expenses are paid by the government, and they perform before large audiences. As a result the performing style is becoming slick, and the extended forms are disappearing in favour of truncated versions which are devoid of musical sense.”

I interviewed American phenomenologist Alphonso Lingis for the EROS issue of landscape/architecture/political economy journal Scapegoat, that was co-edited by Christie Pearson and Nasrin Himada. Lingis’ work has been of interest to me since the mid-1990s when I heard him speak at a Virtual Futures conference at Warwick in the UK. Much of my current work on “the politics of vibration” involves a rethinking of Eros and its relation to subcultures in particular.

Lingis’ work consists largely in presenting a cross-species, even cosmopolitical phenomenology of what it means to seek to bind and be bound to other entities, in full awareness of our vulnerability and capacity for exploitation. In a series of books that begins with Excesses: Eros and Culture (1984) and Libido: The French Existential Theories (1986), continuing with the remarkable Abuses (1994) and Dangerous Emotions (2000), through to the recent Violence and Splendor (2011), Lingis documents the varieties of erotic experience, building on Plato’s “love of knowledge” (“philo-sophia”) and Freud’s meditations on the erotic drives and how they form “civilization and its discontents.” But Lingis goes much further, proposing, for example, the possibility of a civilization built around an unsublimated eros. He gives as historical evidence of this possibility the temples at Khajuraho in India. Yet his argument also relies on an intimate but rigorous analysis of his own erotic experiences.

The University of Chicago Press has just published Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism, co-authored by myself, Eric Cazdyn and Timothy Morton. I wrote up my own thoughts on the book here a while ago. It was a tough book to write: despite everything that’s said about Buddhism, we felt like we were entering a no-man’s land as we worked on it. Exciting and unnerving at the same time. I think it’s come out well though! Here are the amazing blurbs from the back of the book:

“I have contemplated and endured NOTHING for so long that it did not seem right to break my practice or offer other readers something like insight, possibly a moment of sense-making and affirmation. But I break out of my trance to assert the emphatic necessity of this book, so erudite without loading us down, relentless in its ability to resignify. Sassy, brilliant, a genuine engagement with and of thought, this work tunes us to a thrilling, endorphinating way of thinking: my drug of choice.”—Avital Ronell, New York University

“The reader will delight in two important aspects of Nothing: a multitude of contemporary Buddhist responses to the great political and social changes that have affected Asian countries—imperialism, colonialism, communism, corporate capitalism—and rigorous elaboration of Lacanian psychoanalysis with Buddhist psychology. This book is exceptional.”—Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

I have an essay in the fine new collection from Bloomsbury Books, Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South, edited by my friends/colleagues at the University of Potsdam, Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz. The book grew out of a conference on the topic held in Berlin in 2011, and features some of the most important contemporary thinkers of global cultures of the copy, of piracy and alternative distribution/production systems as they are emerging around the world, including Ravi Sundaram and Lawrence Liang. The book is an excellent response/companion to the eye-opening Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report. What the essays and report share is an interest in understanding how informal economies and practices of distribution have established themselves in various parts of the world, how they relate to global capitalism and its more formal legal and economic structures, and how the metaphor of “piracy” helps or inhibits understanding the situation. My own essay, “Depropriation, the Real Pirate’s Dilemma” is one of my first attempts to think about global gift economies, and the possibilities offered by global access to new media, for a flourishing collective life in which property regimes are minimized.

The University of Chicago Press will be publishing Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism and Critical Theory, by Eric Cazdyn, Timothy Morton and myself, in their Trios series in Fall 2015. As with other books in the Trios series, the book consists of three longish (25,000 words plus!), quantum entangled essays, in this case exploring the relationship, or lack thereof, between Buddhism and Critical Theory. My own essay is entitled “To Live in a Glass House is a Revolutionary Virtue Par Excellence: Buddhism, Marxism and the Politics of Non-Alignment.” Although Buddhism played an important role in In Praise of Copying, especially in terms of rethinking the meaning of practices of copying, this essay is a more direct attempt to write about what Buddhism means to me today, and what role it can play in twenty-first century critical thought.

I’ve known Eric since I moved to Toronto in 2002, and Buddhism (not to mention Marxism) is something we’ve talked about almost since the beginning. Buddhist thought is present in a variety of ways in Eric’s recent book The Already Dead — notably in his reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I met Tim in California in 2009 after reading his essay “Hegel on Buddhism” — it turns out that we grew up about ten miles away from each other in the west London suburbs, and shared some of the same Buddhist teachers and more. Buddhism has played an important role in much of Tim’s work — in Ecology Without Nature, The Ecological Thought and his recent Hyperobjects. The three of us put together a panel on Buddhism and theory for the MLA in Los Angeles in 2011, and the Trios book project has evolved out of that. It also began as a response to the various critiques of contemporary Buddhism made by Slavoj Zizek — a challenge that we’ve all responded too in often very different ways.

My essay is a meditation on the relationships, historical, theoretical and prospective, between Marxism and Buddhism, and tracks the way in which a number of thinkers (including Georges Bataille, Gendun Chopel, Gary Snyder, Thomas Merton and the Speculative Non-Buddhist writers) have understood this relationship. The first half of the essay examines Bataille’s interest in Buddhism and yoga, and makes the argument that many of the key Bataillean concepts in use in theory today (sovereignty, formlessness, general economy, the community that has nothing in common) have their origins in Bataille’s attempts to reconcile post Popular Front leftism with the unnameable excesses and nothingnesses of meditation and tantric yogic practices. The essay then situates Bataille’s struggles to formulate a politics of yoga within the broader post WWII geopolitical context of the Cold War, and the problem of how to formulate a non-aligned politics (which in Asian societies often took the form of innovative attempts to reconcile Buddha and Marx). The essay concludes by looking at the way Buddhism, post-Bataillean or not, haunts attempts to envision a post-capitalist politics today.

I have essays in two new collections of work on intellectual property. The first, “From the Right to Copy to Practices of Copying”, in the Rosemarie Coombe, Darren Wershler and Martin Zeilinger edited volume Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (University of Toronto Press, 2014) is an expansion on the conclusion of In Praise of Copying, which advocates a rethinking of intellectual property. We are living through fundamental shifts in the way in which human societies produce and share copies of things, such that we need to rethink intellectual property in a way that reflects the actual practices of copying that prevail today, rather than merely relying on legal definitions. I also advocate for certain legal reforms. Thinking about practices allows us to affirm that contemporary cultures of sharing are built around collective intentional acts, rather than simply being random transgressions of a self-evident law. The second essay, “Structures of Sharing: Depropriation and Intellectual Property Law”, in Intellectual Property Law for the 21st Century: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Irwin Law, 2014) develops a specific aspect of the argument above, namely the problem of appropriation as it relates to intellectual property law. I argue that current practices of copying force us to try to think beyond ideas of originals and copies as private property, and to imagine new ways of thinking about copies outside of discourses of ownership. I elaborate the idea of depropriation, objects that have no owners or are collectively owned, through an analysis of the work of French film-maker Jean-Luc Godard, and think through how depropriation could be integrated into legal models of IP, beyond traditional models of fair use or fair dealing.

In Praise of Copying was translated and published in Korean and Indonesian editions this year.

The Korean edition was published by Hong C Communication, and translated with great diligence and care by Seungyoung Noh, who often seemed to know more about my book than I did.

The Indonesian edition was produced by the KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta, making use of the Creative Commons license that the book was issued with in an interesting and to me exemplary way, producing an edition that is principally available as a free PDF via their website (much like the free PDF available from the Harvard website), as well as a print edition that is being distributed to community libraries across Indonesia. Ferdi Thajib of the group described the project as follows:

“We are a collective who since 1999 have been engaging in popular education approaches aimed at widening public criticality With this rather broad aim, our activities have revolved around the promotion of local knowledge production practices and functioning ourselves as a hub that connects academia, social activists, cultural producers and the public at large in meaningful encounters
Around one and a half years ago, we received funding from Ford Foundation Indonesia to initiate a project looking at issues of Media and Technology convergence, which includes a component of publication of translated books on cultures of sharing within the digital environment. That is how we became acquainted with Mr. Boon’s work. The whole project allows us to work on three books, namely: Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture (which was published last year), the second one (if permission granted of course) would be In Praise of Copying, and the third installment would be Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks.
Our first reason for translating the three books is that they all provide key insights to explain what is going on in other parts of the world in regarding to issues such as copyright, copy culture, sharing culture, file-sharing, creative commons etc. – issues that are not new for us in Indonesia, but which have not received adequate critical discussion. This is not so much because of the lack of criticality per se, but more a matter if language barriers. We feel that the rapid development of vocabularies related to internet architecture and the radical changes it has brought to the cultural facets of everyday life has not progressed hand in hand with its better understanding in local settings; not only in daily situations, but also in legal/governmental/ policy making environments.
The second reason is related to the respective content of each book. The selection of In Praise of Copying is prompted by some of the ideas that Mr. Boon has brought up, especially in how he shed light on the entanglement of copying with various forms of cultural production and understanding across the globe. I personally believe that the philosophical take of Mr Boon on copying that crisscrosses the East and West binary may speak a lot to our potential readers here.
And another reason is the practical consideration of the licensing system used in circulating the work. As one of our goals is to educate people about the importance of sharing, most of the texts that we have produced and published are distributed under Creative Commons A-NC-SA, including the last publication of Free Culture in Indonesian.”

You can read Thajib’s analysis (with Australian media researcher Alexandra Crosby) of copyright, the commons and sharing networks in Indonesia here, and a more detailed analysis of these issues in relation to video activism in Indonesia in the media studies journal Platform. Thajib and Crosby’s work resonates in intriguing ways with the studies presented in the excellent Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report — and suggests an important set of emerging practices of open source sharing/distribution that utilize Creative Commons licensing — in emerging economies.

I have an essay, “Meditations in an Emergency: On the Apparent Destruction of my MP3 Collection” in an excellent new anthology of essays called Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices and the Fate of Things, edited by David Banash and Kevin Moist. It’s a great collection, and includes Stanley Cavell’s important essay on collecting, and nice work by Banash and others. I got kind of obsessed with collecting while writing In Praise of Copying, since collectors are some of the most profound thinkers of the distinction between original and copy, or good copy and bad copy. My essay is about what it means to lose and then try to restore a digital collection today, and is written in diary form, describing my own recent experiences with my MP3 collection. On the one hand, it feels like data is infinitely retrievable today, and that collection is therefore quite banale (this is the argument that Simon Reynolds makes in his Retromania). On the other hand, when you actually lose data, it turns out to be much more fragile, much more contingent than you thought. But losing data can open us up to recognizing that, against the model of the private collector with his or her hoards, the basis of collection is sharing. When the infrastructure that supports sharing really exists, our love of particular objects isn’t diminished, but our desire to hoard it is.

Update: The excellent PopMatters has just reprinted the essay in full here!